Kamila Shamsie - Broken Verses

‘You were most of them. There’s also a whole phone thing going on which is starting to get to me.’

‘What phone thing?’ He reached up to my hair and pulled off the band that tied it up.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Probably just a crank caller. I’m being paranoid. Result of getting a lecture from an esteemed journalist about staying under the radar.’

‘You’ve lost me. If you ever cut your hair, Aasmaani, I’ll run through the streets wailing like a madman. What journalist, what radar? What have you been doing?’

‘Nothing very effective.’ I held up a lock of my hair over his upper lip to see what he’d look like with a flowing moustache. ‘Unless alerting reporters and Archivists and doctor’s sisters and God knows who else to my attempts at discovering what happened to the Poet can be termed effective.’

All the playfulness vanished from his face as he took hold of me by the shoulders. ‘Aasmaani, you stupid woman. What have you been doing?’

I pulled myself away, and stood up. ‘Don’t talk to me in that tone.’

‘What have you done?’ He was standing up too, now.

‘Nothing. Nothing that led anywhere. I went looking for answers about the Poet, that’s all.’

‘You did what?’ He caught my shoulders again. ‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that maybe everyone was right all along? That really powerful agencies were involved with his death?’

‘He’s not dead.’

He slammed his hand on the desk. ‘Whatever happened to him sixteen years ago, Aasmaani, someone — maybe several someones — planned it, and executed it, and has kept it a secret all these years. And you just decide to wake up one morning and let the world know that you’ve decided to be Nancy Drew.’

‘Hey!’

‘Don’t “hey” me. These people are dangerous. And they’re without compunction. Who do you think you’re dealing with here, some incompetent cartoon goons? They can hurt you. They can kill you. They can do to you what they did to him. And that may not matter to you, and it certainly won’t matter to them, but it goddamn well matters to me. Do you have any idea how much it matters to me?’

I didn’t know what to say to that. I just stood, looking at him, wondering where this terrifying and terrified stranger had come from.

What an odd life I’ve had, I thought unexpectedly. Because it was my life I didn’t stop very often to think how it must look from the outside, or how distinct it was from other lives. But here was Ed, almost delirious with panic because I had been asking questions about the Poet’s death — seeing his reaction I couldn’t help but feel silly about those moments of concern I had about ringing telephones or men wrapped in shawls. This was nothing. Compared to what I’d grown up with, this was nothing. I was nothing. There wasn’t a thing I had yet done to shake the complacency of those men who were so assured of their ability to know exactly what was going on that they wouldn’t strike unless someone posed a threat. I posed no threat. I had, to all intents and purposes, come no closer to finding Omi than in all those years I believed he was dead. That was the terrifying part. And I had no idea how to start looking for him. That, that was what was unendurable.

‘You don’t really believe he’s alive, do you?’ I said at last.

‘Oh God, Aasmaani.’ He stepped back and covered one side of his face with his hand. ‘I don’t care if he’s alive or not. I don’t care about him. But you. You…’ He came closer to me. ‘What if he really is dead?’

I shook my head. ‘No. It’s him. I know it is. And it’s like a miracle.’ I was speaking slowly now as for the first time I tried to explain what it meant to me to read those pages. ‘It’s like… stepping into a dream of colour.’

‘I see.’ He shrugged. It took me a moment to understand why that mechanism of self-defence had come into play.

‘I’m sorry, Ed.’

He shook his head. He was unshaven, and I could imagine how his stubble would feel against my lips, the rasp of it. ‘How do you not resent him? The Poet. How? My mother… everyone she ever… I always…’ He stopped, drew a long breath.

‘You resent your stepfather?’

Ed made a dismissive gesture. ‘That nonentity? Hardly! I resented all the others.’

‘Oh.’

‘And I resented her for having them.’

‘We’ve all got our different wounds, Ed. At least she didn’t ever leave you. See, that’s what I obsess about. The leaving.’ He stood there with his hands jammed into his pockets and I could see the young boy who jumped off a tree and broke his leg to distract his mother away from everything else in the world.

And I had hidden Omi’s postcard from Mama.

It was the second time in twenty-four hours that I had felt this tug of recognition towards the man opposite me — but with Mirza that recognition had only led to self-pity. With Ed, it brought on something more complicated. Here stood a man of such intelligence and ability — a man of such potential — unable to regard the scars of adolescence as markers of injuries he’d survived rather than as evidence of the pain inflicted on him. And what reason did he have to be scarred? Because he was something less than her entire world?

‘It’s none of my business, but, you know, she didn’t stop being a woman because she became a mother.’ Wasn’t that really, ultimately, what I had wanted of Mama? That she be my mother to the exclusion of all else? Is that why I remembered all the days and weeks and months she went with the Poet, and never the ones during which she stayed with me? She was twenty-six when I was born. Twenty-six years old: a mother and a woman desperately in love — could she have known right away that she would, at so many times in her life, be forced to choose between those two incarnations? If yes, then the wonder of it is that she didn’t choose that moment to disappear, to step right out of the heart-cleaving complication that her life became the moment I was born.

‘Think about it, Ed, she wasn’t even twenty-five when your father left. What did you want her to do? Take a vow of celibacy for your sake? Would you, at twenty-five, have sworn off sex for ever, under any circumstances?’

‘Please. You can’t compare…’

‘What? Can’t compare the needs of men to the needs of women? Ed, try not to be an insufferable bastard.’

‘Why are the things you can’t get past any more acceptable than the things I can’t get past?’ he demanded.

‘Oh, don’t even try that. You didn’t want your mother to have anyone in her life other than you. I never demanded anything quite so selfish.’ No, I didn’t want her to have no one else. I just wanted to always be first. And why shouldn’t I? I was her child, I was the defenceless one. But I couldn’t even pretend to believe that. In the sanctuary of Beema and Dad’s house the only thing I needed defending against was my mother’s absence.

He looked down at the carpet, the toe of his shoe tracing over the intricate paisley pattern, and when he spoke his voice was very soft. ‘But I didn’t have anyone in my life other than her. No father who cared to know me, no siblings, no cousins, no real friends.’ He looked up. ‘Don’t you have any idea how lucky you are, how fortunate your life has been? I have every right to be obsessive. You have none. Why are you wasting your life being obsessed? Don’t you have any idea how wonderful you could be if you just gave yourself the chance?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know who you see when you look at me.’

He leaned back against the desk, giving himself the extra distance to see me in my entirety. I couldn’t help pushing my hair off my face. ‘A woman no one could ever choose to leave.’ He took a step closer to me. ‘So don’t run away to pre-empt a move I’m never going to make.’